Prime Time 4, Workbook

Data Protection Day Reading: How you pay for free apps a) Read the text below. Nothing in this world is free. So who pays for free apps? Most of the software we use is free: e-mail providers, cloud services, all of our social media, and many apps and games on our app stores. Isn’t that strange? Nothing in this world is free – but apps? … no, in fact, they’re not. No app is for free. After all, software makers need to eat. In fact, someone does pay them. If it isn’t you who pays for the software you use, it’s someone else. Almost always, it’s advertisers. The idea is that you see their ads when you use the software. Another popular way to pay for free apps is data collection. Large companies want to find out what people are interested in, for example what they searched for on the internet and what they bought. For this reason, they need your personal data in order to be able to show you personalised ads. That’s why social media like Facebook and others always seem to know what you might want to buy. Of course, these companies only make money when you use their software as much as possible. So they hire psychologists who know what their software and apps must be like to make their users addicted 1 to them. This happens because we feel we’ll miss something if we don’t use them. Take farming games apps, for example. You can pick fruit and vegetables only in a certain window of time. If you miss that window, your plants will die. We don’t like to lose anything, even digital vegetables that are not worth anything, so we open the app again and again to collect them. Another point is that we value 2 things which we do ourselves. Apps make use of this by getting you to do something yourself in the app early when you start using it, for example, by playing a tutorial level. You feel good after having done something yourself, and you go on. What can you do about it, you might ask. Who can stop us from being glued to our phones? Well, the only ones who can do something about it are we ourselves. After all, if nobody gave away their data and no one wanted to see ads, those big companies wouldn’t try to make software that works that way. 1 addicted – süchtig 2 to value sth. – etw. wertschätzen b) Look at the text in detail and find the following information. Information Lines examples of free software 1–3 who pays for free software why companies collect data how social networks personalise ads how app developers 3 make us use their apps regularly who could do something about it 3 developer – Entwickler/in 3 5 10 15 20 25 40 7 Unit Play IT safe forty Nur zu Prüfzw cken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv